Creative Writing Exercises

Creative writing exercises are essential tools for building writing skills and sparking imagination. These exercises encourage writers to experiment with new techniques, explore different perspectives, and push the boundaries of their creativity.

Creative writing exercises are different to writing prompts.

While prompts may ignite long forms of writing, these exercises are designed to get you working on short pieces. The value of these creative writing exercises in in the practice more than the piece you produce.

This isn’t to say that you results of these writing exercises can’t be used to inspire something longer, but that’s an exercise for a later practice.

For now, grab your notebook and get ready to give your creativity muscles a workout with these creative writing exercises.

• Open your favorite newspaper or news website. Take the third story on the first page. Take the first person mentioned in that story. Describe them, physically. Describe their initial instinctive reactions to the news in the fourth story on the first page, using all 5 senses.

• Free write for 5 minutes without using a noun.

• Go to the front page of Wikipedia. Hit Random. That’s your plot. Hit random article. That’s your character. Hit Random Article. That’s your setting. Write 1000 words.

• Take two genres that don’t usually go together e.g. Romance and horror. Write a 500-word story staying true to the genre conventions of each. This story must resolve, staying true to the conventions of each genre.

• Rewrite a folktale of your choosing in a science fiction setting.

• Take a random object in the space you’re in right now. Write 200 words describing the absolute worst things about that object. This cannot be a person.

• Take a random object in the space you’re in right now. Write 200 words describing the absolute best things about that object. This cannot be a person.

• Write a 200-word flattering description about an infamous and widely despised public figure.

• Take a writing prompt. Write a complete story – setting, character, plot, resolution – in 100 words.

• Write a Twabble. (A Twabble is a piece of fiction published on Twitter in a single tweet i.e. 280 characters including spaces)

• Describe everything you can smell right now, and describe it using the context of the other senses.

• Think of an anecdote someone you know tells often. Write it down in the way they would tell it.

• Write a scene where Character A is telling Character B some bad news. Character B needs to react to the news. Do not write what the news actually is.

• Take an object in your room. Do a quick Google and find out who invented it or how it came to be, if you don’t already know. Write 500 words about that initial conception. This doesn’t need to be historically accurate.

• The full moon tastes like…

• His voice smelled like…

• The music tasted like…

• Red feels like…

• Her walk was like the sound of….

• His cry looked like…

• For a story you are currently working on, take an object that is important to either a character or the plot. Write 500 words of backstory about this object (this doesn’t need to go into your draft).

• Take a character from your current WIP. Write 1000 words, non-stop, of first person narrative where this person is describing themselves before the events of your story have started.

• Take a character from a famous story that is at least 200 years old. Take a character from a movie that has come out in the last year. Put these characters together in a new story.

• Think of a time when you were a child and felt scared. Write about the incident through the eyes of a child the same age (that doesn’t necessarily need to be your child self).

• Take a character from your current WIP. Step forward to a time in the future and have that character, as a much older version of themselves write their younger selves a letter.

• Take a dictionary. Choose three random words. Write each at the top of a column. Below each, write 25 words that connect to each word that have some personal resonance with you.

• Look at the list of words you compiled in Exercise 26. Free write a 1000 word short story that utilizes each word in a meaningful way.

• Take a writing prompt. Write a complete and completely fresh story (one you have not thought about in any way before) using the three-act story structure, start to finish, no revising, no backtracking just writing to the end. It can be as long or as short as you need it to be.

• Think about something that can’t be photographed. Write about it with a photographic level of visual detail.

• What’s the one question your protagonist wants to be answered? Answer it for them. Does it make a difference to your story if they know the answer?

• Write a short 500-word piece about a house that burns down, completely to ashes. For the character in your story, this is the greatest thing that could have happened to them.

• Think of your favorite book as a child – one that wasn’t a famous fairy tale or other very well-known story. Rewrite the plot as a short story.

• List ten things that the world would be better without. Write 1000 word scene that shows the effects of not having ever had one, some or all of those things.

• Think of a book or movie you’ve recently enjoyed. Write the plot as a short story from the antagonist’s perspective.

• Start writing a new story, introducing your main character in the first line. For the rest of the opening paragraph, describe only the setting. In the final sentence of that paragraph, return to the character and introduce something further about their personal situation.

• Repeat the exercise from 35, except this time, write the setting description with words influenced by how your character is feeling at that moment.

• Write the opening of a new story with a new character. In one paragraph, introduce the character, the setting, and the character’s current situation in life. In the final sentence of that paragraph, introduce an insurmountable problem that has or is just about to change this character completely.

• Look around at people in a waiting room, or bus stop, airport, supermarket line etc. Choose one person and observe closely everything they’re doing with their hands. What might these hand activities reveal about their personality?

• Take a novel, on that you’ve read or something completely new. Copy down the first sentence. Continue to write your own version of what comes next and complete a chapter.

• Take a piece of short fiction or a film and examine the protagonist’s main conflict. What is it they want and what is preventing them from getting it? Now, give that same character a completely different conflict, a completely different desire. What is standing in their way now? How does the story play out differently?

• Consider a character engaged in a simple, everyday action in a public place. Describe this character and what they are doing from the perspectives of five different people who are in the same place.

• Write 500 words describing anger.

• Write 500 words describing jealousy.

• Write a detailed description of the place you live (your house, your yard, your town) without describing what it looks like.

• Write a scene focussing on a dialogue exchange between two lovers in bed. Each person has something they are hiding from the other person. Let the reader figure out each character’s secret without actually writing what it is.

• Write a 500-word paragraph on a subject of your choosing. The paragraph must not contain any dialogue. The paragraph must be written in prose form but possess a distinct rhythm based on rhyme, syllable and alliteration.

• Choose a song you like and listen carefully to the lyrics. Re-tell that song in a short story of no more than 1500 words.

• Write a scene, a few paragraphs,

• where a character takes his or her last breaths.

• Take the character from exercise 48. This is the main character in a new 1000 word story which must end with the same death scene you wrote in Exercise 48.

• For the next month, every day, write 100 words. They do not have to be the same story; they do not have to be chronological. They do not need to be fiction. After 30 days, take your 3000 words and work them together to form a new story.

• Describe in minute detail the experience of eating fresh pineapple as if you are writing for a person who has never been able to taste anything.

• Using third person omniscient viewpoint, write a single scene that describes the first and last day of school for a single character.

• Write 500 words in a first person point of view without using any personal pronouns.

• Write a short piece of fiction, a complete story of no more than 2000 words centering on a single character. This is not the main character. This character does not appear in the story.

• Describe an interaction of intense feeling between two characters who have known each other for a long time. Do not refer to the character’s emotions.

• Take a well-known character from literature or film. Write a short piece where that character is doing something in the way they usually would. At the end of the scene, make that character do something completely opposite to what would have been expected of them.

• Take a complete story you’ve already written, preferably a long time ago. As you read through it, start cutting out words until you have cut at least 10% of the word count.

• Take a piece of writing you have completed that has a clear protagonist and antagonist relationship. Rewrite the story so the antagonist is the sympathetic character.

• Take a character from a current work in progress. Write a short story centering around them that has nothing to do with the piece you’re currently working with.

• Take a writing prompt and write a 1000 word story in any genre or style that contains a flashback.

• Rewrite the story you wrote in Exercise 60, starting with the flashback as the opening scene and fill in what happened to get to the events of the original story.

• Start writing a new story either with a prompt or an idea you’ve been holding onto for a time. Write out the events in the story as they happen and where they happen without any dialogue or scene description. Get to a conclusion. Go back to the beginning and add in dialogue and more character emotional reaction. Go back to the beginning and now add the physical scene description.

• Describe a landscape that might usually be thought of as ugly, through the eyes of someone who is feeling ecstatic about something completely unrelated to the place.

• Describe a landscape that might usually be thought of as beautiful through the eyes of someone who is feeling misery and despair.

• Write a scene where a character has a strange, surreal and unexplainable experience. Without having them think it’s a dream, what is their initial justification of what is happening?

• Write an exchange of dialogue where no one is listening to anyone else.

• Write a description of a character based on another character’s stereotypes.

• Write a fight scene between four characters that not only describes the action, but also the space where it is occurring. Do not use dialogue. Do not kill any characters.

• Take two famous fairy tales or other short folk stories. Rewrite the events from one story from the perspective of the main character from the other story.

• Write a scene that shows a character observing something sparking an emotional response.

• Rewrite the scene from Exercise 70 with the opposite emotional response from the same character without changing what they are looking at.

• Using a third person point of view, write a description of a person with low self-esteem. Do not explicitly reveal the character does not like themselves but let it show through in the description.

• Take a subject you know a lot about and write a short story about a character who is a certified expert on that subject. The character must be opposite to you in every way.

• Take a novel similar to the one you’re writing. Read the first chapter. Go through line by line and make notes of what the author is doing in every sentence and how that sentence serves the scene and the chapter as a whole.

• Take a story you have already completed. Rewrite it, writing a different version of the same story for each narrative point of view (third person, omniscient, first person, you can even try second person).

• You’re going to write several versions of the opening sentence of a story describing a character’s reaction to the weather at a particular time. The first version shows the character is angry. The second version shows the character’s age. The third version shows what the character has just done. The fourth version references what the character is just about to do. The versions do not need to relate to one another. They do not need to be the same character or even the same weather.

• Take a story you have written where two characters engage in a heated confrontation (or write a new story for the purpose of the exercise). Go back to the beginning of the story and rewrite with one of the characters knowing the fight is going to occur.

• Take a story you have written and analyze it according to Orson Scott Card’s model The M.I.C.E Quotient. Rewrite that same story centering on a different aspect of the M.I.C.E Quotient.

• Choose a common genre. Write a short story using as many of the tropes and clichés of that genre as you can think of.

• Take the story you wrote in exercise 79. Rewrite that same plot without using a single genre cliché or trope.

• Take the story you wrote in Exercise 79. Using the same plot and characters, rewrite that story using the genres and tropes of a completely different genre. It cannot be a sub-genre or end up being a cross-genre piece.

• Take an item of clothing you are currently wearing. Describe in prose form at least 50 different details of that piece of clothing.

• Take the last story you have completed. Look at the way the setting is first described. What is the point of having the setting the way you have written it? What’s the impression you’re seeking to convey? List 10 things that make this setting uniquely suited to the impression you’re trying to create. Add those ten things into your story.

• Take an exchange of dialogue that occurs between two characters in a story you have already written. Assume the story has already informed the reader of anything this dialogue exchange is imparting. Rewrite the dialogue without imparting any of that plot information, focussing on how the characters feel about one another.

• Take a short piece you have already completed. Remove every adjective and adverb and set them aside in a list. Take that list and for every word that seems obvious or cliché, write three better alternatives. Replace in your story.

• Take the same short piece you worked on with exercise 85. Again remove all of the adjectives and adverbs. Replace these removed adjectives and adverbs using only nouns and verbs to provide description.

• Take a piece of writing you have already completed. Rewrite the first sentence of each paragraph as if it were serving as the first sentence of the whole work. Write the last sentence of each paragraph as if it were the last sentence of the whole work.

• Start an entirely new story from a fresh writing prompt. Introduce a character you’ve never thought of before and write their descriptive introduction based solely on actions they are performing. Use these actions to describe how the person looks

• physically, without overtly describing a single detail.

• Take a story you have already finished and rewrite the first page with the complete opposite emotional tone to the one you have started with.

• Take a story you have finished. Make a list of all of the reasons you wanted to write this story – the themes you wanted to address, the tones you wanted to play with, the characters and adventures you wanted to explore etc. Go through your story sentence by sentence and consider how each line relates to your intentions for the story. Rewrite any sentence that does not serve your purpose.

• Take a scene you have already written, one that you’re not completely happy with. Rewrite that scene with the same characters and action taking place in a completely different setting.

• Take a story you have already written where you have included examples of character dialect and pronunciation into their dialogue. Rewrite their dialogue using only formal words and try to capture the same character by their choice of words rather than their pronunciation of words.

• Take an intensely dramatic scene either from an existing story or write a new one. Make every line of dialogue underplay the action so that only your exposition can convey intensity and drama.

• Take a notebook into a public place where you can hear actual conversations taking place. Record as much as you can of the actual conversation. Now, use that to write a short scene based on the conversation you have witnessed. How does dialogue on the page need to function differently to actual spoken conversations?

• Go through a story you have already written and remove every dialogue exchange where the characters are either greeting one another or saying goodbye. Does this alter your plot or scene in any way?

• Take a short piece you have already written and rewrite it as if you are writing it for a twelve-year-old. If you usually write for children, rewrite the story as if you are writing for a mature adult audience.

• Write a paragraph opening a scene (any scene). In this paragraph, be sure to include one simple sentence, one compound sentence, one complex sentence, one complex-compound sentence, one fragmented sentence and one run on or comma splice sentence.

• Take a story you have written where your character has a job. Give your main character a different profession, one completely removed from the one you have written about. Rewrite your main character’s introduction with this new profession in mind. The scene cannot take place at their work.

• Take a story someone else has written (a friend, for example, not a professional writer) and write a formal constructive critique of their work.

• Think of a famous writer whose work and style you are very familiar with, but someone who writes quite differently and in different genres to you. Take a writing prompt and write a 1000 word story emulating the style of the writer you’ve chosen.

• Take a random object from your home. Write 10 descriptive similes and 10 descriptive metaphors about that object without employing clichés.